Social Psychology - Introduction -

Ψ Social psychology is the scientific discipline that attempts to understand & explain how the thought, feeling, & behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.

Ψ Social psychology: a science that studies the influences of our situations, with special attention to how we view & affect one another.

Ψ Social psychology: A broad field whose goals are to understand & explain how our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, & behaviors are influenced by interactions with others. It includes the study of stereotypes, prejudices, attitudes, conformity, group behaviors, & aggression.

Ψ Social psychology: The scientific study of how people think about, influence, & relate to one another.

Ψ We construct our social reality.
Ψ Our social intuitions are powerful & are shaped by behavior.
Ψ Attitudes shape behavior & are shaped by behavior.

Ψ Social influences shape behavior.
Ψ Dispositions shape behavior.

Ψ Social Psych's principles are applicable in everyday life.

Notes on the effects of Human Values

Ψ It would seem self evident that the values we hold
influence our judgments. If what we think is based on incomplete, unverifiable or misinterpreted data our human bias will results in wrong conclusions. The fix obviously lies in the application of the scientist method.

Hindsight Bias

Hindsight Bias - the tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one's ability to have foreseen how something turned out. a.k.a as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. Conductive to arrogance.

As defined above it would seem that there is nothing good about hindsight bias. The article below counterbalances this negativity.

Article:

"Hindsight Bias - NOT just a convenient memory enhancer but an important part of an efficient memory system.

It is said that hindsight is 20-20. According to new research, hindsight bias -- the way our impression of how we acted or would have acted changes when we learn the outcome of an event -- is actually a by-product of a cognitive mechanism that allows us to unclutter our minds by discarding inaccurate information and embracing that which is correct.

Researchers in the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, have developed a model of hindsight bias called Reconstruction After Feedback with Take the Best (RAFT). Drs. Ulrich Hoffrage, Ralph Hertwig and Gerd Gigerenzer, authors of the RAFT model, published their research in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, published by the American Psychological Association.

Hindsight bias can occur when people make a judgment or choice and are later asked to recall their judgment. If, in the interim, they're told what the correct judgment would have been, their memory of their own judgment may become biased toward the new information. For instance, suppose a person was asked to estimate how many votes John McCain would get in the Michigan primaries. If before the election, he estimated 30%, and then learned that the actual figure was 50%, he may later recall that his answer was 40%.

The basic idea of the RAFT model is that any feedback or correct information a person receives after he has given his initial judgment automatically updates the knowledge base underlying the initial judgment. If a person cannot remember this initial judgment, he will reconstruct it from what he currently knows about the situation. And what he currently knows is the updated version of what he used to know. So while feedback does not directly affect a person's memory for the original response, it indirectly affects the memory by updating the knowledge used to reconstruct the response. Rather than thinking of hindsight bias as a flaw of human cognition, as previous research suggests, Hoffrage, et al. argue that it's a by-product of an adaptive mechanism - one that makes human memory more efficient.

To test their RAFT model, the researchers set up experiments in which, for instance, 80 student volunteers at the University of Chicago were provided with nutrition information about certain foods such as fat content, number of calories and protein content. Then participants were shown a list of the same foods split into pairs and the researchers asked them to decide which item in the pair had the higher cholesterol content. They were also asked how much confidence they had in their choice. Either a day or a week later they returned to the laboratory and were asked to recall the decisions they made about the food-item pairs and how confident they were in their decisions. Some participants were simply asked to recall their earlier decision. Others first got to see the actual cholesterol content of each food item and were then asked to recall their earlier answers.

Consistent with the model, the researchers found that knowledge of nutrition values was updated such that it was more consistent with the feedback (i.e., the actual cholesterol content), whereas this knowledge remained unchanged when no feedback was given. Based upon these results, the RAFT model was able to make precise predictions about when hindsight bias occurs. In fact, the researchers found that the model's predictions were accurate up to 80 percent of the time. Furthermore, when the researchers reminded participants of the cues they originally used to make their decisions, the incidence of hindsight bias dropped.

"RAFT is the first process model that is able to predict for an individual item of an individual participant whether hindsight bias will occur, disappear or even reverse," states lead author Hoffrage. "It is a cheap price we have to pay for a much larger gain: a well functioning memory that is able to forget what we do not need, such as outdated knowledge, and constantly updates our knowledge by increasing the accuracy of our inferences."

Correlation is not causation! it is a clue that can be used to predict.

Surveys

• Four potentially biasing influences in Surveys

Experiments

Ψ An experiment is a method for identifying cause & effect relationships by following a set of rules & guidelines that minimize the possibility of error, bias & chance occurrences.

•Disadvantage: Information obtained in one experimental situation or laboratory situation may not apply in other situations.

•Advantage: Identifies cause & effect.

Ψ Random selection is how you draw the sample of people for your study from a population. Random assignment is how you assign the sample that you draw to different groups (control or experimental) in your study.

Ψ We randomly assign in order to help assure that our groups are similar to each other (i.e., equivalent) prior to changing the independent variable.

General Ethical Precautions

• Do no harm!
• Secure informed consent.
• Explain the procedures before hand.
Use deception only if essential
& justified by a significant purpose.
• Keep confidential all personal information.
• Fully explain the experiment afterward, including any
deception.

Precautions about Findings

• Report Honestly
• Limit Misinterpretation

Notes

Ψ Mundane realism can be defined as a superficial similarity to real life. It is not important in an experiment.

Ψ Experimental realism is important, an experiment should absorb & involve the participants.

Ψ Generalization from laboratory to life: Does not always happen. Be cautious!

Social Psychology Robert C. Gates

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night ;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!